I grew up in a 600,000 inhabitants city in Germany. They got EMUs in the 1930s. When they got the next generation in the 1970s all level crossings were replaced.
So California, one of the forerunners in the US, seems to be roughly 90 years behind. Depends on your age whether you'll be able to enjoy a quiet train trip during your lifetime. </sarcasm>
In 1930s California’s population boom had just started. There were 5 million people in the state, split between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Both cities had electric trams, but the demand for regional rail wasn’t high enough to electrify it.
Even today it’s not uncommon to de-electrify lower-volume rights of way.
It has been said the broader gauge was chosen at the time to make trains able to run safely over Golden Gate Bridge with strong side winds. My physics is not good enough to calculate whether that argument makes sense. And I have no idea how realistic that route ever was.
I don't think the gauge is a major problem. Train orders are always a custom project, few urban networks use exactly the same standards. Railroad manufacturers are used to different gauges.
In particular the track gauge is a long way from being the only consideration. Structure gauge and Loading gauge are also crucial. When I first moved here despite this being an important port city a Victorian arch bridge carrying road traffic over the railway meant every single freight train carrying containers from the port to the rest of the country needed to either go on a circuitous route or use special low wagons with reduced capacity, which hold a container below axle height so as to fit under that bridge.
In that case blocking the road and dropping in a new road bridge was affordable given the economic value but generally you put up with what you've got.
True, when it comes to loading gauge one can no longer even about a standard. Most countries have several different loading gauges even for the same track gauge.
In practice I am not convinced the BART is severely impacted by their "weird" gauge (whatever is meant by that, not sure what their loading gauge is, for passenger trains the distance to and height of the platforms would be most relevant).
Stadler KISS series used by Caltrain is built at least in 3 different widths.
Auckland, NZ had (not sure whether still in use) rolling stock from the UK, converted from 1435 mm to 1067 mm track gauge, the loading gauge obviously was close enough.
Finland has engines (Sr3, Dr20) and railcars (Dm12) designed for smaller central European loading gauges. They look a bit tiny compared to other stock, but they are fully usable.
Hmm, my naive summary of AGPL is "If you run AGPL code in your web backend you are obliged to offer the backend source to everyone using a web client". No wonder it's explicitly forbidden at Google.
What does that mean for a linker? If you ship a binary linked with an AGPL linker you need to offer the source of the linker? Or of the program being linked?
In practice I think it's pretty much equivalent to the GPL for a linker. But I can understand why people in commercial settings are wary of this license.
For them it's 0.00...1% of their business. For a small customer who deployed on their service it might be 30% or more of their development budget. Of course that's the way corporations do business. But that's why as a small one you can't really trust any of them. You can just place bets and sometimes you lose.
To put it another way, it is an implicit cost of using AWS: You have to have contingency plans to cope with discontinued services, and you need to be able to realistically execute those plans. I think it is just another reason that AWS isn't as good a deal as it might initially appear to be for small businesses. (Larger organizations may have a better chance of amortizing these costs over many projects.)
The US is not a master piece of freedom. Want to market or own foreign shares? Want to travel to Cuba? Have you gone through the crazy US border control process as a foreigner?
Yes, China is absolutely worse. But the US is not a good example.
I never claimed the US was perfect, just better. I think using it as an example is fine. No country is perfect by any metric; everything is a matter of comparison over who is better or worse on a particular thing.
> Want to market or own foreign shares?
ADRs work for that, no?
> Want to travel to Cuba? Have you gone through the crazy US border control process as a foreigner?
I agree those things are bad, but they have nothing to do with market access, which is the topic at hand.
I have a London stock exchange trading account with Schwab. I think I opened it online. The only catch is that I can only deposit or withdraw funds via my US Schwab account.
Zulip is excellent for geeks. I don't think it's for the broad public. We use it in our company with great success, but our marketing people still have not understood how topics are used (both by their own comments and by the evidence I see regularly).
Topics only help to keep things organized and better than other chat systems if they are reusable and long-term identifiable. If people create a new topic like e.g. "Wednesday meeting" or "The printer does not work" every time they want to say something you end up with same mess as in other chat systems. Also it's quite human that discussions get offtopic. Zulip has nice support to continue in or move the discussion to the right place. But to my experience only a couple of geeks uses them.
Why is chat not a paper trail? Just yesterday I found a chat message that I had written in 2019 and I was surprised that I already back then knew things I did not know yesterday.
(We are use zulip for chat which is better than everything else I have used since irc. But the search is too limited for someone who knows regexes.)
Many reasons. First, chat doesn't exist. What exists is scores of incompatible chat apps.
I use WhatsApp but I consider WhatsApp messages throwaway because I keep losing them anyway. They are scattered across multiple phones with no way to merge them. Backups are platform specific. Exports don't contain any metadata and can't be imported.
"Chat" is a useless mess, not a paper trail.
For email, I have consistent backups with metadata across many email providers and email clients going back to 2008.
This seems risky, I'm not a lawyer but BCC company emails to personal account seems like a nice way to pave a highway for the company's legal team to request court ordered access to your personal affairs.
According to most work contracts / NDAs you wouldn't be allowed to keep private copies of work email.
If you are willing to violate that rule or the message affects your work contract which you are of course allowed to archive at least in zulip chat that's very simple (for a software person). They have a straightforward REST API. IIRC you can even choose between markdown source and HTML rendered output.
Because e-mail is naturally self-replicating and not bound to organizational boundaries, in ways chat isn't.
Chat messages tend to exist in one place only (vendors' servers), with maybe a transient local copy that gets wiped over time, or "for privacy reasons" (like Messenger switching to E2EE, effectively wiping cached history on any device that went through the transition). Chat message is an object, it's designed to exist in a single place, and everything else is a pointer to it, or a transient cache.
E-mails, in contrast, are always copied in full. You send an e-mail to me, you retain an independent copy, I get an independent copy, and a bunch of servers in between us keep an independent copy too, even if briefly. I forward your e-mail somewhere, more people and servers get their copies. I reply back to you, more independent copies, that also quote the previous messages, embedding even more copies that are even more independent. This makes it very similar to paper correspondence (particularly when photocopy machines are involved), i.e. impossible for a single party to unilaterally eradicate in practice.
And then chat vendors implement silly features like ability to retroactively unsend a message, force-deleting it from recipients' devices too (it may still exist in backups, but vendors refuse to let you access those, even with a GDPR request). In e-mail land, that's fundamentally not possible.
(Microsoft tried to bolt it onto their corporate e-mail software, but it only works in Outlook/Exchange land, and it's easy to disable (at least was, in OG Desktop Outlook - not the still broken New Outlook Desktop Web App). I discovered this when I once saw an e-mail I was reading suddenly disappear from my Outlook, which prompted me to find the right setting to disable honoring unsend requests.)
So, come discovery time, critical chat history may turn out impossible to find, and any deeper search will require forcing cooperation of the chat operator. E-mails, on the other hand, tend to turn up, because someone, somewhere, almost certainly has a copy.
Chat is a paper trail in finance at least. For regulatory purposes, bank personnel are not allowed to delete even their WhatsApp and other text messaging app info from their phones.
So California, one of the forerunners in the US, seems to be roughly 90 years behind. Depends on your age whether you'll be able to enjoy a quiet train trip during your lifetime. </sarcasm>
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